Guide · Pricing
The build is the
smaller number.
Quotes concentrate on what a site costs to build, and owners are then surprised by what it costs to keep. Here is the annual side, line by line, including the lines that can honestly be removed.
Published 2026-09-24 · Formory Group
The unavoidable lines.
A domain renewal, typically $15 to $30 a year depending on the extension. Hosting, from nothing on an included plan to roughly $15 to $40 a month for anything serious. An SSL certificate, which should be $0 — any provider charging for a basic certificate in 2026 is charging for something free.
For a business that never changes its site, that is the whole cost: somewhere between $200 and $600 a year.
The line most people underestimate: someone to change it.
Prices change, services change, staff change, a location opens. Without arranged access to someone who will make those changes, the site freezes. Of the 27,080 working sites we opened across the GTA, 3,000 carry a copyright line five years old or older — almost none of those owners chose that.
Ad-hoc developer time runs $75 to $150 an hour and, more importantly, depends on that person still answering. A maintenance arrangement converts an availability problem into a monthly line.
The optional lines, honestly labelled.
Search work and Google Business Profile management. Advertising management, which is separate from the ad spend itself. Review generation. Content. Analytics tools. Each of these is a real service and none is mandatory.
The test for each is whether you could say what it produced last quarter. If not, it is a subscription rather than an investment, and the first thing to cut.
What we charge and what it covers.
$129 to $990 a month depending on the size of the site, covering hosting, the domain, the certificate, edits whenever they are needed, the Google Business Profile and ongoing search work — one fee rather than three suppliers. The build is $590 to $3,900, paid after delivery.
Full detail is on the pricing page. The reason to publish it at all is that a quote which only appears after a discovery call is a quote calibrated to what the buyer seems able to pay.
Three ways businesses waste money here.
Paying for a certificate. Paying for two overlapping services — a maintenance plan, a separate SEO retainer and a separate hosting bill that nobody co-ordinates. And paying for a plan whose reports show impressions and authority scores rather than enquiries.
None of those is fraud. All three are avoidable by asking what a line produces and accepting a specific answer only.
Questions
Straight answers.
Can I run a business website for nothing?
Close to it, if you accept a builder's free tier with their branding and a subdomain. For a business that bills customers, the $200 a year for a proper domain and hosting is not the place to economise.
Is an annual plan cheaper than monthly?
Usually by ten to twenty percent, and it removes your ability to leave when the service stops. For a new supplier, pay monthly until they have earned the annual commitment.
What happens if I stop paying?
Depends entirely on who owns what. If the domain is in your name and you hold a backup, you can move. If the agency owns the domain, you are not a customer, you are a tenant.
Two minutes
Where does your
own site land?
Everything above came from opening real websites. Yours takes ten seconds: we load it the way a customer would and say what we find, including when the honest answer is that nothing needs doing.
Think yours needs
rebuilding?
Send us the address and what you do. We will look at what is there and tell you whether a rebuild is worth the money, or whether the problem is somewhere else entirely.